Ibrahim is 11 years old and has never been “so scared.” At ten o'clock this Saturday night a waterspout flooded the entire ground floor where he lives with his mother and father on Campoamor street in l'Hospitalet de Llobregat. "I picked up the child and went out with him in my arms. Ibrahim was crying and everything was flooded," recalls Abdelilah Idrissi. This resident of the Bellvitge neighborhood is of Moroccan origin, but has been living in Catalonia for more than twenty years. "I had never seen anything like it. I feared for our lives," he explains.
L'Hospitalet de Llobregat has been one of the municipalities most affected by the torrential rains that hit the metropolitan area of Barcelona on Saturday night. The storm has flooded numerous streets, especially in neighborhoods such as Bellvitge, Sant Josep and Santa Eulàlia, where in some points the water level reached above the waist.
Idrissi and his wife, Yamina Tirari, were trying to bail water from the apartment where they live after spending the night with neighbors. "It's been horrible. We've been left with absolutely nothing at all," Tirari cries as she tries to pick up remains of broken, soaked boards and furniture.
The intensity of the rainfall also caused numerous incidents and made l'Hospitalet one of the municipalities from which the most calls were made to the emergency telephone number. Until seven in the morning this Sunday, 112 had received 725 calls from the city, compared to the 196 registered in Cornellà or the 153 from Badalona.
At 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, Mustapha Nassiri was driving his car along Pau Casals Avenue when the water prevented him from continuing. “I went out the window and almost swam away,” he remembers this morning. “I have never seen anything like this in my life,” he concludes. The image of Nassiri bailing out water from inside the vehicle is a constant on the streets of l'Hospitalet where the most coveted thing is for the insurance tow truck to arrive. In addition, many overturned containers accumulate on the city's sidewalks.
One of the most relevant incidents occurred at the CUAP Pura Fernández health center, where the entry of water both from inside and outside forced the activity to stop and the users and professionals to evacuate. At the time of the evacuation there were seventeen users, including a child under one year old and four homeless people. Some patients pending evaluation were referred to the Cornellà CUAP.
The mayor of l'Hospitalet, David Quirós, in response to questions from EL PAÍS, recalled that the city took the worst part around 9:00 p.m. "Up to 31 people have had to sleep in the Gornal sports center. We have suffered a very exceptional situation. We have never experienced anything like it," he highlighted. “Now we are reviewing all the schools and institutes to see what conditions they are in for Monday,” reports Quirós.
Sant Adrià del Besòs, just on the other side of Barcelona, has also suffered significant flooding during the early hours of this Sunday. The water - on this occasion coming from the Besòs River itself - has flooded several streets in the municipality and has left vehicles and containers covered in water, such as on Olímpic Street and - above all - on Pi i Gibert Street.
“Here, whenever it rains we have to regret it, but we have never seen a flood like today,” explained a resident of Pi i Gibert. The basements of the buildings were, this Sunday, completely flooded with water, the street has become a large muddy field and the cleaning services continued, at midday, bailing out the water from the streets with pumps. While the mayor, Filo Cañete, supervised the entire operation at street level. The owner of Bar Nova, in Pi i Gibert, was astonished: "The entire warehouse has flooded. I don't understand how it happened. When I left yesterday it was all dry," he lamented. Several clients grabbed mops and brooms and began cleaning the bar while shouting indignantly at the situation. “They should do something because the river is seeping into our basements,” one of them lamented.
The Besòs river has experienced a very rapid rise during the early hours of the morning. At three in the morning, the Catalan Water Agency placed its flow as it passes through Santa Coloma de Gramenet at 520 cubic meters per second, above the danger threshold. Hours later, the flow had exceeded 900 cubic meters per second. Given the risk of flooding, all access to the Besòs Fluvial Park has been closed and the authorities have asked to avoid the banks, underpasses and any point close to the riverbed. Despite this, and since it has just finished raining, hundreds of citizens have come to the Besòs to see an unprecedented flood of water just before the mouth.
